This course will prepare you for making strategic decisions specifically about innovation. It will give you an understanding of why firms innovate, why and how they compete on innovation, and what role innovation plays in shaping the strategic decisions of companies. You will learn how to source innovation, the types and patterns of innovation, how to compete in dynamic standards battles and how to gain dominance, how to protect innovation from imitation, and the crucial question of timing - a new product launch and market entry.
This course is part of the HEC Paris MSc in Innovation and Entrepreneurship. If you are admitted to the full program, your coursework will count towards your degree program.

Ministrado por

Thomas ASTEBRO

Transcrição

[MUSIC] In our last lesson, you learned that innovation explains much of the growth of national wealth. In this video, we'll look at how innovation can also explain increasing inequalities within countries. As you saw in the graph of global GDP from our previous video, most of the economic growth in Western countries came in the last century. For example, output per person in Great Britain barely doubled in over 500 years, between 1300 and 1700, but in the 20th century, it doubled every 32nd year. But economic growth decelerated after 1970. While the average annual growth rate was 2.82% between 1920 and 1970 in the US, the annual growth rate fell to 1.62% after 1970. The causes of this deceleration have been hotly discussed and greatly researched. Let me give you two widely influential arguments about what has happened. Both deal with innovation. In the first theory, Professor Robert Gordon at Northwestern University claimed that the era of great invention has passed. During the 20th century, electric lighting, indoor plumbing, home appliances, and modern medicine, to name just a few, truly transformed our lives and workplaces. For example, advances in medicine led to life expectancy growing from 45 to 72 years between 1870 and 1970. Advances since 1970, however, tend to involve entertainment, communication and the collection and processing of information. According to Professor Gordon, using your mobile phone to send pictures to your friends will not help us to increase economic wealth. Instead, Professor Gordon warns us that the younger generation might be the first in modern history that fails to exceed their parents' standard of living. Erik Brynjolfsson and Andrew McAfee at MIT on the other hand, believe that digital technologies are one of the most important driving forces in the economy today. Computers are now doing things that only people were capable of doing decades earlier. This trend will only accelerate, say Brynjolfsson and McAfee. And it takes one look at self-driving cars and drone deliveries to see why they think so. In this second theory, recent economic stagnation is actually a result of the rapid pace of our technological trajectory. It is so rapid and has sped up to such an extent that it has left a lot of people behind. So both incomes and employment opportunities have become more uneven. This divergence of income has been most striking in the United States, but has appeared in other countries as well. Here we have a line graph showing the change in earnings of people in the United States over the past 40 years. Clearly, the rich have gotten richer, while the income of the bottom 20% of the population has moved very little. The richer have gotten so much wealthier, that in 2010, the richest 1% of the US population had 34% of the accumulated wealth in that country. That a large part of the population has not had their incomes grow, explains why the median income has been slow to increase in the past 30 years. Recent technological advances have favored some skill groups over others. Particularly those who are superstars in their field. For example, the highly educated and those who can leverage their skills in other ways, using computers, benefit the most. The losers in a digital economy have been those whose jobs have been replaced by computers. Think about the new roles of office assistants or assembly line workers. Brynjolfsson and McAfee propose two recommendations on how to deal with these changes. The first suggestion is that entrepreneurs step forward. They believe the stagnation of median wages and polarization of job growth is an opportunity for creative entrepreneurs. Entrepreneurs can develop new business models that combine the swelling numbers of mid-skilled workers with ever cheaper technology, to create value. Their second suggestion is to massively change education. They suggest a more accessible, broad-based higher education system, new communication technologies, and new forms of computer-based instruction to massively increase the skill set of those who did not use to have access to such education. In fact, this is the intent of the HEC online Master's in Innovation and Entrepreneurship. By now, you know the importance of technological innovation and R&D for country-level economic development and for within-country income inequality. In the remainder of this course, we will leave behind these broader economic considerations. Instead, we'll turn our focus to the more strategic aspects of innovation for businesses, allowing you to learn how to compete against other businesses in what can only be considered as a technological arms race. [MUSIC]